AMD has brought their newest Piledriver architecture to two more product lines. The AMD Opteron 4300 series is a socket C32 solution meant for single and dual socket configurations. The AMD Opteron 3300 series uses the familiar AM3+ socket used by many desktop computers. Piledriver based parts are expected to deliver 15% better performance than their predecessors. Let’s take a look at the lineups.
AMD Opteron 4300 Series
The AMD Opteron 4300 series follows in the footsteps of the Opteron 4200 series and 4100 series. They use socket C32 just like their predecessors. Configurations are commonly single and dual socket. Probably the best way to think about the AMD Opteron 4300 series is that it is half of the AMD Opteron 6300 series. Here is the lineup.
All models have turbo features to increase performance in less than fully threaded workloads. While TDPs and core counts vary, the 8MB of cache figure remains constant. Interestingly enough, I was told by a vendor that the AMD Opteron 4000 series CPUs have an interesting usage pattern that has emerged. For CPU light, but PCIe card heavy applications, these CPUs can be paired with the same northbridge and southbridge combinations as their Opteron 6300 series counterparts. That allows for a good amount of PCIe bandwidth. Unlike the Intel Xeon E3 and Xeon E5 series, AMD is still using a northbridge and southbridge configuration. TDP is one part of the equation, but in terms of total system power consumption, one does need to take this difference into account.
AMD Opteron 3300 Series
The AMD Opteron 3200 series was launched earlier this year. I was excited as the socket AM3+ CPUs would be a contender to the Intel Xeon E3 stranglehold on the market segment. A few months later something interesting emerged. The AMD Opteron 3200 series CPUs were hard to find. Another quarter went by and now the AMD Opteron 3300 series is upon us. Here is the lineup:
With only three models with TDP values ranging from 25W to 65W, it seems as though AMD is targeting the Intel Core i3 based server market and maybe the lower end of the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V2 range. The AMD Opteron 3350 HE and the 3320 E may make very interesting options for higher-density microservers. Hopefully we will get one to test soon so we can compare the AMD Opteron 3200 series to the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V2 series.
Who would ever buy these? $500 for a midrange AMD server chip
@BigR
I believe you mean $191
$500 is for the low power 8 core version which have always cost a lot more.
3300 still limited to ECC UDIMMS… RDIMMS still much cheaper.
As someone with a home server with 2x 4184 I’m interested in the drop-in upgrade to the 4386s, but it doesn’t seem like the cost would be worth it. Maybe in a few years I can find some on ebay.
A comparison would be really interesting. My home server is running a low TDP Athlon II CPU on an AM3(+) Tyan Mainboard. I wonder if it’s worth to stick with the AM3(+) and buy such an Opteron 3300 CPU when I need to upgrade or switch to Intel E3, paying additional 100€ for a new mainboard.